“Please have a seat,” Mr. Coffey maintained his pleasant, light tone.
“After a great deal of thought, and careful consideration of what everyone has had to say regarding this matter, Mrs. York and I have concluded that the assault of another student is a very serious matter and must be dealt with accordingly. However, considering the extenuating circumstances, we’ve decided to keep your punishment light, and off of your permanent record. You will serve detention every day for the next thirty days and you will be barred from all school social functions for the remainder of the term.”
My head was swimming? Assault? Extenuating circumstances? What on earth was he saying?
I didn’t realize I had said “extenuating circumstances” out loud until Mr. Coffey smiled jovially at me and said, “Yes. We believe that it is likely that Mr. Murray may have gotten a little fresh with you,” he winked at me.
I looked to Mrs. York. She had her head down and would not meet my eye.
“So, let me get this straight,” I struggled to speak through the emotions of rage and despair and the futility of the whole situation. “At this school, at your school, female students can be groped and threatened and that’s alright. But if a girl tries to defend herself it’s thirty days of detention while the aggressive male student who sexually accosted her and threatened her with violence gets off scot-free? Is that what you’re saying?” I squeaked out.
“Thank you, Miss Sullivan. You can return to class now. And don’t forget to check in at detention hall in the library after school.” Mr. Coffey picked his glasses up off of his desk and replaced them on his nose.
“Mrs. York?” I was bewildered and shocked and stunned and needed someone to provide a voice of reason. “Say something! Mrs. York? Please say something!”
She looked up at me helplessly, apologetically.
“It was lovely to meet you Miss. Sullivan.” Mr. Coffey had risen now. Then he added in clipped tones, “Now get back to your class.”
I stumbled out of the office in a swirl of confusion. Had that really just happened? I was flabbergasted and I didn’t even stop to take the yellow slip of paper that the secretary held out to me as I made my way out of the office. I didn’t need it. I had no intention of going back to class.
Instead, I half-ran, half-walked across the campus, blinded by tears and rage, to my room. I threw myself down on my bed and howled into my pillow with anguish at the injustice of it all. Was Trevor’s father on the board as well? I knew that no matter how long I thought it over, I would never in my life be able to comprehend what had just happened.
As I lay face down on my bed I felt a warm presence around my shoulders. I rolled over to find Stefano perched on my bed next to me, concern etching lines into his ivory white skin.
“Lady Catherine,” he said softly.
I flung my arms around him as if he were real flesh and blood, and was sorry to discover that he still wasn’t. I so badly needed something to cling onto right now – literally as well as figuratively.
“Please. My love. Tell me that you are alright. I can’t bear to see you like this,” he pleaded softly.
I opened my mouth to speak, but I was too choked with emotion to make any sound come out. I fell back onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling in desolation. He lay down next to me and put one arm over top of me in a protective gesture.
We lay together like that for I don’t know how long….was it hours, or only minutes? I couldn’t tell. Time had ceased to exist for me.
Finally I was able to speak.
“Everybody here hates me,” my voice was thin and reedy. Resigned.
“And it’s not enough that they torment me, now they’ve turned the principal against me, too. And I’m being punished – 30 days of detention – for slapping a boy who grabbed me and groped me. And nothing is happening to him, because apparently that kind of treatment of girls is acceptable,” I half-whispered. “What kind of world is this, Stefano? How is this possible? I thought this was the twenty first century. I wouldn’t mind so much if he was being punished as well for what he did to me, but he’s not.”
“Oh my darling, amore,” Stefano tried to comfort me. “Thirty days of detention is nothing. It will pass by in a snap,” he said as he lightly stroked my cheek.
“No it’s not that,” I continued to speak slowly and to sound disconnected from myself. “I don’t even care about that. They want me to sit in the library for half an hour every day after school while I read a book or work on my homework? That’s not even punishment to me. It’s the principle of the thing,” I explained.
“I know. I know it is. Please, amore, tell me exactly what happened so that I can better understand.”
I told him the whole story. I left nothing out. I told him about Cheryl and the stables and that her father was on the board of directors of the school. I told him how she had lied on Trevor’s behalf and how Trevor continuously referred to me as “bitch” and how demeaning it was and how he reveled in knowing how demeaning it was which made it all the worse.
“Do you see why I’m so upset?” I asked Stefano.
“Oh my love, I would kill that boy if I could. I would: I would kill him with my bare hands,” Stefano railed.
“Do you know, you are the only person in the world who matters to me? You are the only person in the world who loves me unconditionally and is always on my side and who I can rely on one thousand per cent? I am so deeply in love with you. You are my everything. You are my heart and my soul, you are me. We are one, you and I.”
Then the floodgates broke and the tears came flowing from my eyes again.
“Stefano, I want to die!” I wept. “I want to die! I mean it! I’ll kill myself! I will, I’ll do it, and then we can be together for real!” I broke down sobbing in his arms.
“Sshh, sshh, my love. You are breaking my heart,” he rained kisses down on my forehead and my cheeks. But then something in him turned and he grasped my head in his hands quite roughly. “You are never to say anything like that again? Do you understand? You are never to speak like that in my presence! This life is a gift!”
“It’s a torture!” I snapped back.
“You don’t know what you’re saying!”
“Yes I do! I do! If I were to die, right now, today, I could be with you forever and I’d be free of all this!”
“You don’t know what would happen to your soul! Just because you desire it to meet mine won’t make it happen!”
“I don’t care! I’ll take that chance! I want to be with you!” I cried and I jumped up off the bed and ran over to my desk. I pulled the top drawer out and started frantically digging through pens and pencils and various junk until I found what I was looking for.
A very shiny pair of incredibly sharp scissors.
I opened them and raised them in my right hand and maniacally began slashing at my left wrist. I hardly felt a thing and couldn’t even tell if I was cutting myself at all. I was in a haze, I had only pin pricks for eyesight, and I just knew I had to do something to release the intense amount of pressure that had built up in my head and my soul.
“CATHERINE!” Stefano cried out in such a piercing, preternatural way that I was stunned and I stopped.
“You would so break my heart!?” he cried out imploringly. “You would endeavor to cause harm to yourself in my sight and think that I could stand by and coldly watch?”
The hurt and heartbreak in his voice was palpable and I crumbled, dropping the scissors to the floor and my head in shame.
“Let me see your arm,” he demanded and I held it out to him.
“They are mostly but superficial scratches. But there are one or two deeper…you must bathe them and wrap them immediately,” he commanded me. Then he said in a softer, more vulnerable voice. “For each of the marks on your arm, there is one of equal length and depth on my heart.”
“Oh Stefano! I would never hurt you on purpose, believe me!” I sobbed.
“But when you hurt yourself, you hur
t me in equal measure. We are one as you yourself said just minutes ago,” he regarded me solemnly.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Forgive me, I beg of you. Forgive me. I’m out of my head!”
“Of course, I forgive you, my heart. Of course I do.”
He had pulled me to him and was holding me close now, both of us wrought with emotion.
“But I need you to listen to me. Your life is a precious gift. The physical manifestation of spirit is the greatest miracle and it is monstrous to treat it lightly. You cannot simply end your life and know what will become of your soul! Why am I trapped here like this, but my Caterina progressed onwards to some other place? There is no way of knowing what would become of you. And I would feel responsible for you throwing away your precious, precious life and would have to bear that on my conscience for all eternity.”
“I’m so unhappy!” I wailed. “It gets worse and worse every day!”
“But that is just now. And this is only a tiny part of your life and one day when you are a grown woman looking down into the eyes of your beautiful daughter you won’t even remember this chapter of your life. It will seem almost inconsequential, a mere pain of growing. There is so much beauty and life inside of you that has yet to be given expression and it would be a crime against humanity to snuff it out! And these experiences, as painful as they are, are carving you out and making you a deeper and more profound and more beautiful being. This is what it feels like to be forged in fire. And you will come out the other end fortified. I promise. I love you as dearly and as deeply as you love me. Our love transcends worlds.”
“I know,” I whispered, feeling completely chastened and quite foolish.
“Let us go through to your little basin there and attend to your wounds,” Stefano said gently as he nodded towards the lavatory. And he followed me in and supervised me as I washed and dressed my injuries.
“I’m sorry. You must think I’m crazy,” I said quietly. “I do.”
“Sometimes when we have so much emotional pain, it seems to help to transmute it into physical pain. It is easier to bear,” he said sagely. “But that does not mean it is a good or acceptable thing to do. I am only grateful that you did not do serious damage to yourself.”
“What do I do now? About this whole situation. I can’t keep going to school here if I’m going to be bullied and threatened and then I get into more trouble for telling. I can’t abide it,” I said, gripping the gauze that encircled my forearm.
He let out a deep sigh as he regarded me sorrowfully.
“You see, this is where I fail you,” he smiled sadly. “If I were of the physical realm I would pummel this boy into the ground and leave him to die.”
“And as much I love the thought of that right now, then you’d be sent to jail and that would do me no good either. And I’d still have to go to school here knowing that the principal was an idiot who needed to pull his head out of his ass,” I said in resignation.
“I would pummel the principal, too,” Stefano assured me and we both managed a very tiny laugh.
“But seriously? What do I do?” I can’t just accept this and go on as if everything were normal! I can’t. I’d rather quit school and face the wrath of my parents,” I said.
“Quitting would only be allowing them to win,” Stefano observed. “I think you should take a few days to recover from the shock of all this, and then think strategically about how you are to proceed.”
“Ha! And what more is going to happen to me in the next few days? What other tricks are they going to pull?” I asked him.
“Nothing now, my love,” he said softly as he pulled me to him. “Nothing. They will let the dust settle before they try anything again. Mark my words. They know they just got away with something, and they will lay low…for a while at least.”
“I could tell the whole world about Cheryl and her cousin when she was only fourteen! I could tell everyone about Trevor getting Lisa pregnant! I could say…”
“Shhhhhh – no, no, no. These tactics are beneath you. You can come up with something more sophisticated that doesn’t involve mud-slinging,” he reasoned. “Remember what I told you all those weeks ago about how you must not allow yourself to be brought low.”
“I’ve missed my next class,” I said as I looked at the clock on my bureau.
“Stay here awhile. Rest. Collect yourself. And go back to class after the afternoon break,” Stefano advised me.
That did sound very appealing. We curled up together on top of my bed and I closed my eyes and just tried to breathe without letting any thoughts happen.
Sleep mercifully took me and I was only awoken by Margie barging in and slamming the door shut.
“Dude! What are you doing?” she asked me as I bolted upright from sleep.
“Oh god, Margie…” I said, not knowing where to begin.
“Are you alright? What are you doing back here asleep?” she questioned.
“What time is it?” I asked as I groggily rubbed my eyes.
“It’s like, ten minutes past noon. But you look like you’ve been asleep for a while. You didn’t just come back,” she stated.
“No, I didn’t. First I got hauled out of first period to go down and talk to Mr. Coffey and then I was so furious and angry that I came back here instead of going to my next class. And I guess I missed third period as well.”
“Okay,” she said. “This sounds bigtime. Start from the beginning.”
I related to Margie in as much detail as I could remember the events of that morning.
“I’m so frustrated and angry and exasperated…there are no words for it!” I raged. “Can you imagine? A girl slaps a guy for grabbing her ass and she gets punished while the guy gets away with it? The injustice of it is so overwhelming! And he didn’t say that he didn’t believe me that Trevor had groped me – he pretty much said that boys will be boys! Well indignant girls will be indignant girls! What if I went to his house and killed the sonofabitch in his sleep? Hey? Murderers will be murderers, right?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Margie tried to slow me down. “I get it – believe me I get it! That is completely un-fucking-believable,” she sighed heavily. “But you know why it is. We all know why. It’s nothing to do with what happened, it’s to do with the families these assholes come from. We all know that Cheryl’s father is on the board of directors, well I think that Trevor’s family donates heavily to the school.”
“Donates what? My mother told me how much they’re paying for my tuition. If the school is making that much money from every student here, what on earth do they need donations for?” I asked in disbelief.
“I don’t know…renovations, art for the school’s collection, scholarship fund, landscaping?” Margie conjectured.
She narrowed her eyes at me and asked suddenly, “What happened to your arm? Your wrist?”
“Oh,” I said looking down at the gauze. “I just scratched myself. No biggie.”
I made a mental note to wear my blazer at all times to cover it up.
“Hmm,” she said as she tossed a disbelieving look at me.
“So what do I do?” I asked her. “I can’t abide this. I can’t. I really don’t care if I get kicked out of school now. In fact I hope I do. I’m so furious I actually don’t give a shit about anything in the world.”
“Okay, I know. I get it. But you can’t think like that – you let them win if you do.”
That’s exactly what Stefano had said.
“So what then?” I persisted.
Margie thought for a moment.
“You know what, my dear? I have some friends. And I have some favors to call in. I want you to trust me. And I want you to forget all this,” she was looking at me deadly serious in the eye and I knew she meant business.
“I’m not sure I get you,” I looked at her quizzically.
“You don’t need to. In fact it’s better that you don’t. But just trust me. I want you to take deep breaths, and I want you to go back to class af
ter lunch, and I want you to continue on as usual and trust me that karma will take its course. I mean it.”
Margie had spoken and I could tell from her tone that there would be no questioning her further.
“Alright,” I said uncertainly. “There’s nothing I can do anyway,” I grumbled.
“Well you can put your mind at ease, because it will be taken care of. Guaranteed.” Margie winked at me. “Now do you need to get something to eat before you go to class?”
CHAPTER 28
For the next few days I was a machine. I don’t think a single expression ever crossed my face, nor a single emotion ever generated in my heart or mind. I kept absolute steely eyed focus and I wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything. The only time I let down my guard even a fraction was when I was alone in my room at night in my nightgown with Margie. I loved listening to her cracking jokes and telling me stories about her friends. It was true she ran around with a crowd who were considered n’er-do-wells but they sounded like the most decent people in the world to me and they had more integrity in their little fingers than most people at this school put together.
I was an especially frosty ice queen when it came to Chad. When I walked into the Italian classroom and saw him sitting up near the front in hopes that I would join him there, I didn’t even flinch. I said good morning strongly and coldly and strode to the back of the class without missing a beat.
I was finished now – I would no longer allow anyone to hurt me. I could never allow myself to succumb to that kind of weakness again. I would strive to annihilate my feelings and if I couldn’t do that I would at least keep them under lock and key under my façade of steel. That also meant that I could have no regard for anyone else’s feelings. They weren’t my problem. If Chad felt slighted that I wouldn’t sit near him, so be it. I needed to protect myself and having him as my friend only made me a target and caused me grief and anguish.
I was feeling so cold and hard and invincible that it was incredibly fortunate for Cheryl that she never bumped into me in the shower room during those days. I think I could have actually smashed her head into the tiles without a second thought. As it was, the only time I saw her was in English class. She must have marked the change in my posture, in my countenance, and definitely in the cold blooded look in my eye, for she kept out of my way and kept her stupid jokes and comments to herself.
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